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Team
TL;DR
- We’re a large tiny remote company
- We’re romantic: we experiment a lot just because it’s fun
- Our happiest moment is releasing a product on Product Hunt
Who we are
At the moment, we’re a team of around 150 people.
We are a diverse team:
- About half are developers. Half of them are frontend devs, about a third are backend, the rest are .NET, machine learning, devops, and testing.
- About a third of the team are artists and designers: icons, illustrations, 3D visualization, animation, UX designers.
- Marketing. We share, write, publish, outreach, and optimize. We rarely buy traffic, so marketing is mostly production too: designing, writing, and a bit of coding.
- Support, sales, finance, tagging, photographers, and even a makeup artist.
Fully distributed before that was cool
We gave up our office in 2011 and turned fully remote. While incorporated in the US, our team is spread worldwide: Argentina (headquarters), Serbia, Germany, Netherlands, and even China. Unlimited recruiting area and zero office expenses are good for the team and the profit.
How we stay aligned
Tells the founder:
We stick to Scrum because it provides a universal set of rules widely known and accepted across the industry. It makes them easy for teams to follow and adapt. They are not something made up by a boss on a whim. I use these two books as a bible (and no, I don’t earn a cent if you click).
The beauty of Scrum is in its flexibility. Need more structure? Stick to the routines. People drowning in meetings? Combine or drop a few. It’s all about balance. If questions start popping up. like "Where are we headed?" or "How does my work fit in?", that’s a sign to tighten up the Scrum processes. It's a great tool to bring clarity when it’s needed most.
We also use OKRs, following John Doerr’s book. The tool called Quantive is nice.
While we had a teal organization in the beginning, we shifted to a hierarchy when we reached around 30 people. My biggest influencers are Andrew Groove and Peter Drucker.
As a manager, I have to learn about many professions, though not at an expert level. I could be a mediocre frontend developer, bookkeeper, stock trader, writer, sketch artist, international taxation consultant, rustic carpenter, studio photographer, and a whole range of other things. So, before opening our photo studio, I read a book and took a few classes on studio lighting. Knowing a trade makes a big difference and solves most of the management challenges.
Carpentry, however, needs more practice.
Ivan
What drives us
- Being a human-to-human business. We’re always listening to our customers. We draw graphics that they really need. We do usability tests and pay close attention to all the comments we get on our forum and socials. These insights help us grow and keep us on track.
- Being experimenters and explorers. We’re constantly working on new projects, trying new stuff, sharing it, marketing it, and occasionally giving up.
- Releasing new products. It's always a big day for us when we launch on Product Hunt. Getting real feedback from users is like a rush. Follow us on Product Hunt to share the moment.
History
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